how this context informs the meaning of your text, and vice versa. Think about it this way: what difference does it make if you did or didn’t know what this context meant in eighteenth-, nineteenth-, or twentieth-century London? How does our knowledge of the space illuminate the literature? And how does the text illuminate the context? What happens, for example, when we think of a place or institution not just through historical or cartographical archives but through fiction or poetry or an image that brings it alive?